Things haven’t stood still just because there’s been Dreamhack Winter! We’ve been showing you a ton of in-progress gifs of the Season Hydra boss, but no boss is quite complete without a boss portrait, and so Vilya has come to the rescue:

The Temple of Seasons will feature no less than three boss battles, of which we’ve only really talked about one. Here’s the boss splash for another, which has already been mostly implemented:

We don’t want the regular enemies to be left hanging, though! As always, they get cards for the player to collect. Here’s the one for the Season Magicians:

While Vilya’s been at it creating these things, Fred has represented us over at Dreamhack Winter! Here we see a couple of innocent youths being corrupted by the grind:

And finally, here’s a shot of Fred secretly mind transferring a certain powerful Overpass boost to the members of Fnatic, which they would later be compelled to use in their match against LDLC:

So this weekend we went to Dreamhack Stockholm to exhibit the game (and watch some brilliant esports)! The expo was a blast, and we met a lot of awesome people. It’s always great exhibiting the game and chatting with you guys IRL!

Instead of showing more progress on the Temple of Seasons this week we thought it’d be nice to show some pictures from Dreamhack instead (sorry for the crappy quality, tho):

We got some pretty exciting news. We’ve been invited by our old school to tag along to Dreamhack Stockholm this coming weekend to showcase our game at the game expo!

This will be the first ever visit to a Dreamhack event for all of us and even though it’s not one of the big ones (Dreamhack Summer & Winter) we are all super pumped to showcase Grindea, talk to people and watch some e-sports! If you are in the neighborhood, drop by and hang out with us!

Anyways, the most common usage for the Season Change Ability will be to open up new paths to explore. For Fred, this means a lot of animations for different obstacles to block the progression for the players.

Most blockades will only be opened during a specific season and closed during the other two. The Phase Shift plate below for example will be blocked by the giant lily pad during the summer and frozen shut during the winter.

And to end this post, here’s a couple of the rooms that Vilya has been working with:

Last week, we all went back to school, but luckily not as students! Wednesday to Friday we attended the Gotland Game Conference as judges tasked with providing feedback to the student projects.

Here’s a showreel of the games:

There were lots of fun games present, and we truly had a blast playing them all! Hopefully our feedback was useful for the students as well.

Some of our favorites include Crocodile Chow-Down, which was an arcade game featuring a large crocodile head where you had to align different types of teeth in patterns provided on screen and then close the lid to “chew the food down” and increase your score. It looks pretty fun in the trailer, but actually playing it was a very nice experience! The game won the Pwnage Award (Best of Show) so apparently we weren’t the only ones in love with it!

Another game that we really liked was Defunct, a “racing” game where you zoomed through large landscapes in search for your long lost father! …to be honest, we don’t really know why you’re zooming through them, but whatever the reason the game had an awesome sense of speed and was a blast to play. Here’s a gameplay trailer:

Playing other people’s games isn’t the only thing we’ve done, although it honestly took up quite a bit of our time! Despite twisting his ankle really badly, Fred managed to churn out some cutscene animations, and Vilya made a couple of portraits! Among them the portrait for the friendly and definitely-not-shady leader of the Collectors:

Last week we sent Fred off to RSM, a Swedish retro gaming convention which we had been invited to some time back. The convention took place last Saturday, and it was a blast! A lot of people came to play the game, and for anyone who likes retro games in general the convention was an awesome experience:

Back home, Vilya and Teddy kept on working as usual. Over the weekend Teddy has been focusing on getting the translation tool polished enough for some public testing. When we first mentioned it, way back when, we didn’t really plan on releasing it until the game was done. However, due to increased interest in translations, we’ve decided to put it earlier so people can translate the game as we keep working on it. Tools need beta testing as well, after all!

The translation tools will, for most people, consist of three different tools. The first one is for translating regular text, which is basically anything from “HP” to spell descriptions.

Another takes care of dialogues, which are more advanced than regular texts for various reasons. The most important one for translators is that parts of every line can be different depending on if the character is speaking to a boy or a girl, or whether the game is being played in co-op and so forth.

The final tool is a simple file merger, which will let you merge two localization files into one. This is useful if more than one person is working on the same translation, since you can work on one part each and then easily merge the files to create the full translation!

This is how it will work for most languages. For translations into languages that have a huge number of written characters, like Chinese, Korean and Japanese, there’s a bit more work involved, but we’ll delve deeper into that when the tools are actually made available later this week!

Vilya, in the meanwhile, has kept working on a bunch of portraits (as usual):

Next up is a revamped portrait of Marino in order to have him match his new sprite!

Secrets of Grindea has survived its first appearance at an exhibition!

GGC ended yesterday, and the response was indeed amazing. Since it was the first time we let people other than our close friends try the game out for real, we did not know what to expect – but we were positively surprised.

We would like to thank everyone who played, your excitement is truly a huge inspiration :D